Up! Up! And Away! - DIY Nursery Mobile

A post about the nursery mobile! Super late, but it still turned out super sweet and it’s worth sharing with you all. I knew I wanted a cloud mobile because I liked the idea of looking up and dreaming about the sky, so I pinned a bunch for inspiration. I found the ones with balloons even sweeter.

Follow Melissa’s board Magical Mobiles on Pinterest.

It’s been awhile now, but I shared about making the DIY hot air balloons for our nursery mobile. You can go back to read about that, here.

I’m FINALLY getting around to telling you about how we put those together to create our mobile.

A video posted by Melissa (@melissashipman) on Oct 11, 2015 at 6:40pm PDT

For starters, we were blessed with an adorable handmade cloud mobile from one of Wyatt’s cousins. Seriously, it was the sweetest little gift.

The felted hearts and clouds are swoon-worthy.

It was awesome exactly as she gave it to us, but. I really wanted the mobile to be able to spin, and I couldn’t get it to work with the ring she originally had it on. Plus, I wanted to include the balloons I had made….

So we deciding to use the hardware from a store-bought clearance mobile we bought at Target many, many months ago.

Spoiler alert–that’s not what we ended up doing.

In the end, we just hung the wooden mobile frame from the ceiling with a short piece of string so we could manually reach up and spin it.

Here’s why:

1. The spinning mechanism had to be hung from something before being hung from the ceiling hook. We tried fishing line, but that just spun the fishing line instead of the actual mobile, so we would have needed some sort of structural piece, like another wooden dowel rod. We considered this, but ended up deciding it wasn’t worth it.

2. The spinning mechanism had to be low enough for us to reach it in order to wind it up and make it play. The mobile was so large, and already low enough to bump our heads on that we decided it was better to not have it any lower.

3. Will already has a wind up musical giraffe that we keep in his crib and turn on for naps and bedtime as part of our bedtime routine so we didn’t NEED it to work. In short, the ends just didn’t justify the means, and Will got his first lesson in Consequentialism.

Just kidding.

But he did end up with a super cute mobile, even if it wasn’t what we originally planned.

As a side note, I also have the original Target mobile to do something with now that it’s all disassembled. I don’t want it to go to total waste, even if it was only $5.

But, to back up a bit, here’s what we did do to build this cute (not-so-little) mobile. First, I disassembled the gifted cloud mobile. It was hard since it was so perfectly cute as is, but it was for the greater good. Again, working on that philosophy lesson for Will.

Then, I used a bigger metal ring (that we had salvaged from an old lamp shade to tie all the pieces onto with fishing line.

The hardest challenge was balancing all the pieces since the balloons were a lot heavier (still light, but heavier) than the clouds. No matter how we tried to measure or adjust how they hung from the metal ring, we couldn’t get it to hang evenly. Plus, when we got it close, the fishing line would slide out of position. It was an endless, frustrating battle and I almost gave up the entire project until I head the whole wobbly thing up over Will’s head and he smiled great big at it.

Okay, my heart is melted and I won’t give up, baby boy.

So, I had the idea to use a more sturdy frame and we picked up an inexpensive wooden dowel from Home Depot and cut it into four equal lengths.

Then, Wyatt used a chunk of scrap wood and cut off the corners to make four even surfaces to attach those dowels to. He used the drill press to drill out holes to insert the dowels into. We glued them in place and everything got a coat of white spray paint. Then, we used these little metal hooks (also from Home Depot) to hang our balloons and clouds from using fishing line.

It was MUCH sturdier and I was kicking myself for not thinking of it sooner, but better late than never I guess. Finally, like a month and a half after we started this project, we were finished and ready to hang it. We used an anchor and a large metal hook to secure it to the ceiling, so it’s sturdy and I’m confident it won’t fall on our sweet baby.

Although, once he’s big enough to stand up and reach it, it will have to go away, of course. We have several months before that will happen, though, so I’m glad we stuck it out.

He likes looking up at it and sometimes I catch him grinning great big as he looks up at it when I come into his room to get him after his naps. Just for fun, here’s the view he sees from that angle.